Beets and bladdernut

Last week, my county historical society offered an unusual challenge: Come in on a certain day, take your pick of ten packets of seeds, pay $5 for the lot of them, then bring back twice the seeds from your crop come harvest-time. These weren't just any seeds, but unusual, heirloom varieties. So I snapped up odd types of beets, peppers, bee balm, basil, radishes, mustard greens, Hungarian blue poppies and fenugreek.

Today I put in the first row of the Bull's Blood beets. It always feels so good to get my hands out in the dirt again.

Later, I planted a handful of bladdernut seeds in the edge of the woods -- a small shrub that I had wild-collected last fall. And spent some time battling the creeping plague of English ivy that is slowly spreading from the west side of the woods below where some fool planted it in his yard, into the section of forest that I like to think of as mine.